If asked what moved them to photograph mountains, Vittorio Sella and Brad Washburn might have just pointed to the memorable images they left behind of some of the harshest, remotest and most sublime places on Earth.

To see their spectacular photos of the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc, the Presidential Range and the Doldenhorn, climb two flights of stairs to the Panopticon Gallery in the Hotel Commonwealth in Kenmore Square.

Take a look at "A View From The Top’’ and be prepared to catch your breath.

Organized by gallery owner Jason Landry, this gorgeous exhibit showcases two pioneering photographers whose distinctive approaches captured different aspects of mountaineering that set a standard rarely matched over the ensuing decades.

However different their backgrounds and styles, Sella and Washburn photographed mountains with a kind of awed reverence for their pitiless indifference to the humans who climbed their surfaces like little bugs.

In their own ways, each conveyed the seeming spiritual serenity of these vast, implacable peaks.

Though shooting nearly 50 years apart, often in different parts of the world, Sella and Washburn took photos that reveal the difficulties climbers faced and the sheer immensity of the mountains they challenged.

"A View From The Top’’ offers 28 images by Sella, including several of shepherds and folk who lived near the mountains he photographed. Washburn is represented by 11 large, mostly panoramic photos in which humans are barely present.

Each is a master photographer who imbues their scenes with a solemnity often reserved for grand cathedrals or other sacred spaces.

Born in August 1859 in the foothills of the Alps, the Italian Sella took the first photos of several major peaks, carrying a bulky 40-pound camera that used 14-by-11-inch plates at the dawn of modern mountaineering.

Born in 1910 and raised in Cambridge by a Brahmin family of outdoor adventurers, Washburn was climbing in Europe as a teenager. An experienced pilot who studied geology and geography at Harvard and later became the founding director of the Museum of Science, he pioneered the art of aerial photography, creating spectacular images of entire glaciers and mountain ranges, mostly in Alaska.

Humans appear in Washburn’s signature "After The Storm, Climbers on the Doldenhorn’’ as six tiny specks, casting absurdly long shadows as they pick their way across the mountain’s jagged crest, sandwiched between the clouds above and sheer slopes below.

In Sella’s photos, his climbers encounter natural obstacles like a series of dangerous crevasses in his 1888 shot of Glacier Blanc. Other times they lug a sled laden with supplies as in his 1897 photo "Traversing the Hitchcock Glacier on the Return from Mount St. Elias."

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Since Sella seemed to shoot from the snowy surface, his photos more than Washburn’s suggest the grueling physical exertion required to climb these mountains.

In an 1888 photo, two climbers approach the highest peak of Les Rouies in the French Alps, pausing as if to summon the energy before following a trail of footsteps ascending at an impossibly steep angle to the distant summit.

Since most of Washburn's photos in this show were shot from an airplane, his mountains are immense, brutally beautiful and godlike.

Whatever his spiritual inclinations, Washburn was an internationally recognized cartographer who must also have seen the mountains he photographed so magically as geological objects, carved across the eons by forces of nature that dwarfed human endeavor.

The nearly vertical rock walls in his 1958 "Moonrise Over the Grandes Jorasse’’ seem utterly impervious to human effort, an affront to will and ego that’s somehow purifying.

Yet in a 1937 photo, Washburn grins boyishly as he handles a large 8-by-10 inch Fairchild camera mounted in the window of a monoplane near Valdez, Alaska.

While some might say it’s impossible to take a bad photo of Mount Everest or K2, Sella and Washburn did more than photograph piles of rocks: they conveyed the human effort and otherworldly beauty of an activity that takes place amid the clouds.

In 1924 Mallory died near the summit of Everest at the age of 37. When his body was recovered 75 years later, the camera he was known to carry couldn’t be found.